Food manufacturers in Australia have a huge market to exploit domestically, but the the international market provides near limitless opportunities for growth. A popular destination for Australian food these days is China - we're their sixth largest food supplier according the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade), shipping $5.3 billion worth of edible goods to their shores in 2016.Here's what you need to now to start exporting food to China. What makes China a good option for food exporters?China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. A burgeoning middle class means there are always new people who're ready to try interesting food products from around the world. The country is second in the world behind the United States for total food imports, Austrade reports, with the total value exceeding $160 billion in 2016.Already this year we've seen reports about Daigou, the Chinese practice of buying products on behalf of someone else, being incredibly popular. ABC News spoke to a Sydney mother that buys groceries to ship to customers in China, who told them, "Australia's organic food is very famous in China" - it seems there's far greater demand for Australian food products in China than there is supply.

A CRM (customer relationship management) system is a key piece of software all businesses should use to make get the best from (and for) their customers. CRM systems can improve customer retention by up to 27 per cent according to Salesforce, a number that can translate into a sizeable amount of revenue over time.Beside improved retention, what are some other benefits of CRM software?Organisation of informationCRM software centralises all of your customer data in one place. This makes it a lot easier to find and therefore easier to use.Without a CRM solution, all of the information in your business might be there, but it could be in an unusable form.Data analyticsCRM software that has all of your customer data in one place gives the possibility for data analytics to take place. Even if the CRM itself doesn't do the analysis for you, its collection of the data into one database makes it a great deal more manageable than trying to enter that data by hand.

If there's a theme running through 20th century manufacturing practices, it's automation. Every day, our technology improves and the list of tasks that can only be completed by a human grows ever shorter. But despite the benefits to productivity that automation can bring, it's a process that has its limits (or at least, it does today).This has been demonstrated in recent times with some fairly high profile examples. Perhaps most vivid is the automotive and renewable energy firm Tesla, and the production of its mass-market electric sedan, the Model 3. Ambitious targets and lofty promises abound, yet Tesla has failed to produce enough vehicles in the time they said they would.What can this situation teach us about the limits of automation, and its positives and negatives?Too many robots spoil the brothTesla is a company well known for its technological prowess. It was one of the first innovators in bring fully-electric cars to the masses, and making them appeal not only to tech geeks, but wider car buyers too.All that said, even titans sometimes fall. The actual production for their latest creation, the Model 3, is far behind what was initially promised and scheduled. The reasons for this could be many, but two Wall St analysts, Max Warburton and Toni Sacconaghi, have argued that the main bottleneck in their production process is the huge amount of automation they're using in their factory. And as it happens the CEO, Elon Musk, agrees: